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Return of the HB Line at SRS
The Department of Energy is bringing the HB Line facility at the Savannah River Site back on line to recycle surplus plutonium and produce uranium-plutonium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel for advanced reactors.
Restarting the facility will be a multiyear process and will yield opportunities for increased domestic production of isotopes with scientific and commercial value. The DOE said that once operational, the HB Line will accelerate the Office of Environmental Management’s plutonium disposition mission by 10 to 13 years while reducing the existing cost.
Praneel P. Gulabrao, Kevin T. Clarno
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 195 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 161-172
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2020.1794455
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Photon buildup is a function of energy, medium, and geometry and therefore must be specifically calculated for the case of interest. The Martian atmosphere, mostly comprising carbon dioxide, is becoming more relevant to radiation researchers and therefore warrants the study of this gas mixture’s buildup properties for ionizing photon flux resulting from the secondary effects of galactic cosmic rays and solar flares. Specifically, this work uses the MCNP6 code to develop energy absorption buildup factors in finite slab models for energies ranging from 40 keV to 15 MeV with Martian regolith as the backscattering medium. The Martian carbon dioxide cycle is accounted for by determining maximum and minimum mean densities as a function of orbital position. An isotropic point source model for the atmosphere is also developed using the geometric progression fitting function. Buildup is bounded to a factor of approximately 23 at 100 keV for normally incident photons at the top of the atmosphere. For conservatism, the design problem neglects coherent scattering but assumes bremsstrahlung effects and uses Klein-Nishina free-electron cross sections for Compton scattering.